Cake or Death? Cake, please.
Today’s article comes to you from ars technica, where a friend of the blog found this article from Matt Ford on how we pick our food. Given that Sci is in the middle of reading “How We Decide” by Scienceblogs own Jonah Lehrer, she couldn’t pass this decision-making kind of article up. It was a conscious decision, I think. Or was it?
I don’t know about you, but everyone Sci knows appears to be trying to regulate their diet somewhat. Most of my friends think the word “die” is in the word “diet” for a reason. But we all still try to eat well, though we’re not going to be subsisting on grapefruit and wheatgrass juice any time soon. We’re all hearing the messages that we need to eat lean protein, get lots of fiber, and eat as many fruits and vegetables as we can afford.
The media nowadays is jam packed with advertisements saying we need to make healthy choices, right next to other advertisements letting us know about the many many offerings available at fast food restaurants for less than a dollar. With all this coming into your brain every day, it can be really hard to make the right decisions. Would a granola bar be good right now? Or should you have some fruit instead? Should you eat the chocolate cake or the ice cream?
And these decisions become even harder when it becomes a choice of fruit vs. cake (I don’t know about you guys, but the fruit would be languishing on Sci’s shelf for months). In these cases, your decision making has to have some layers to it. Rather than just “ooooh! Cake!”, you also need to think “eh, but I already HAD chocolate today, and I haven’t had more than one serving of fruit…and I should get more fiber because apparently everyone needs more fiber…”
VS 
Sorry, Banana. No contest. LOOK at the chocolate shavings on that thing…sigh…
So anyway. Our brains may want cake, and other parts of our brains want healthy. The two sides need to fight. But which areas of your brain are responsible? And how do they modulate each other? That’s what this group wanted to find out.
Hare et al. “Self-control in decision-making involves modulation of the vmPFC valuation system.” Science, 2009.
Filed under: Behavioral Neuro | Tagged: decision making, food choice, prefrontal cortex, self-control | 13 Comments »
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